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How Do We Know We’re Getting It Right?
This week we’re returning to a subject that comes up in one form or another on a somewhat regular basis here, and that’s the good old “family meeting”.
When you work with families who are in business together, or who own assets together, there are typically a number of regular meetings that occur on business related matters, or areas where owners come together to have important discussions.
Holding family meetings, which are largely “by and for family members” is often overlooked, or seen as unnecessary or superfluous.
In reality, they’re sometimes avoided because they can be a bit awkward and uncomfortable, usually for those who should be the ones calling them(!)
Let’s see what we can learn by looking at this again this week, from the perspective of “PACE”.
My PACE Has Nothing to DO with Speed!
I’ll forgive you if, when you saw the word pace, you thought that I was talking about something related to speed.
In reality, while speed is an important consideration for how such family meetings actually happen, that’s not where we’re going now.
If you’re interested in posts related to that angle, please check out: Choosing your FamBiz Tour Guide, or A Family Marathon without a Map.
The new idea I want to share this week is an acronym that I’ve come up with (accidentally, as usual) to think about evaluating every family meeting, just before adjournment.
And the letters in my acronym (or maybe it’s a mnemonic?) are P.A.C.E.
Making Progress, Not Achieving Perfection
Let’s start at the beginning, which is obviously the P, which for me is Progress.
In fact, my main idea is that at the end of a family meeting, I like to ask about whether the people in the meeting feel like we made progress together.
So in fact, my acronym is like a formula, that might look like this:
P = A + C + E
So it’s a way to check on the meeting participants’ views on progress being made, or not, according to three criteria, the A, the C, and the E.
As the one who’s typically facilitating and leading such meetings, I’m always hoping to see lots of heads nodding as I go over them.
If instead I’m getting confused looks, there’s a lot of information in that too, most of it pointing us “back to the drawing board”.
Back to Alignment and Engagement, Again
Regular long-time readers won’t be surprised to see that Alignment and Engagement are part of my progress check, as I’ve written about this pair one several occasions.
See, notably: Family Engagement and Family Alignment – Chicken and Egg
I like looking at them together because I see them as kind of like two sides of the same coin, although that isn’t quite it.
My main message here is that if you are looking to improve alignment, one way to do that is to check your engagement level.
And if you are looking to improve engagement, you might need to look at your alignment.
In any event, I always try to make sure I’m thinking about making progress on both of them in every family meeting.
“Are we more aligned after the meeting than before? Was everyone engaged?”
I Can See Clearly Now
Having alignment and engagement as part of my criteria is helpful for making a memorable word like PACE, because vowels are helpful. But of course another consonant was needed, and thankfully this was an easy one.
One of the biggest reasons that families need to come together to meet and discuss is because there’s usually lots of complexity to their lives, and that makes lots of things unclear to many family members.
This means that there’s a premium on clarity.
See: I Can See Clearly Now, from 2016
The end of any family meeting is a great time to check in on this question too.
“Are things more clear now than they were at the beginning of the meeting?”
Hopefully you get mostly “Yes’s” to that one, but if you don’t you will certainly have a better idea of what you need to focus on during the next meeting.
The Next Meeting
So before you end a family meeting, please consider doing this PACE check.
And, of course, like my dentist and chiropractor do so well, make sure that we have the next date on everyone’s calendar, so that we all know when we are getting back together again, to continue to make progress on our alignment, clarity, and engagement.
